A World Ethos for Global Business?
Cosmopolitan Responsibilities of Management

05 - 06 October 2017
Weltethos-Institut, University of Tuebingen

We have a world economy but no world government; nor can we expect, at least in the foreseeable future, a system of decentralized global governance with sufficient sanctioning powers to enforce legal mandates for business worldwide. For this reason alone, the ethical dimension of business cannot be entrusted solely to the law. Globalized markets would seem to require an underlying ‘ethos’, present to some degree the world over: a common spirit of legitimate, just, and fair business practice substantiated by shared experience. As managers and economic decision-makers, however, are increasingly operating within multi-cultural settings with divergent social customs and conventions, no ‘one size fits all’ approach will do. While on the one hand the growing need for transnational cooperation accentuates the call for a shared ‘world ethos’ for the global business community, on the other hand any proposal in that direction must make room for the need for the diversity and divergence of culture and civilization. At the fifth annual Humanistic Management Conference, to be held at the University of Tuebingen’s Weltethos-Institut, we aim to address this dual need by investigating from various cultural perspectives: 1) how a world ethos for global business could be variously articulated and promoted (‘theory’); 2) the extent to which such an ethos is already present in contemporary globalized business (‘practice’); and 3) what civil society around the world can do to support the efforts of (esp. multinational) corporations in this direction (‚policy’).